CX Maturity Models — Know, Adopt & Concur
Customer Experience is an important tactic to win over your customers. According to a survey by Zendesk, around 52% of customers claim to have made additional purchases from a company that rendered them with a positive Customer Experience.
And this makes it evident that to achieve repeated sales, customers need to be lured with the most lucrative experiences.
However, creating a good customer experience is not a cup of tea. And that’s why using the concept of Customer Experience Maturity is necessary to understand the current status of your customers’ experience and set goals to achieve higher.
This blog will guide you through what CX Maturity is, and how to achieve it.
What is meant by CX Maturity?
CX Maturity or Customer Experience Maturity is a recent concept used in the area of Customer Experience which helps you understand and walk through the core competencies of CX.
It paints a clear view of your company’s strengths and weaknesses highlighting the scope of improvement and areas of excellence.
The success of your CX program depends on how well you understand the various aspects of Customer Experience.
As per the analysis by Gartner, in the new normal, 89% of businesses will compete majorly based on Customer Experience to generate brand loyalties. This implies, to succeed in the market, your CX program needs to work and mature.
Relationship between CX Competency and Maturity
In the most basic sense, CX Maturity is the means to understand CX competencies, thoroughly. Therefore, companies must excel at the 6 core Customer Experience Competencies described by Forrester:
● Customer Understanding: Employees must, at all times, have a complete and accurate understanding of what the customer wants.
● Prioritization: Focus your limited resources on enriching those aspects of the business that add to CX.
● Design: Define the visions of CX and design detailed behaviors for employees to deliver the right customer experience.
● Delivery: The design of the CX must match its delivery. So, coordinate the day-to-day operations in a way that CX is achieved in the right direction.
● Measurement: It is important to quantify the CX goals. The quality customers perceive the degree to which the company’s goals align with the CX goals, and the overall impact of the program on business results must be quantified.
● Culture: And lastly, CX must be embedded as an important virtue in the very culture of the organization. It shouldn’t be a thing to lure customers but the right thing to do!
CX Competency and Maturity go hand in hand. You need to be well versed in the core competencies to create the best CX program for your business.
And then, the CX Maturity Models can help you categorize precisely what level of Customer Experience have you attained. Thus, bridging the gap between CX competency and maturity.
Most Commonly used CX Maturity Models
CX Maturity Models helps you gauge the level of maturity your CX program has achieved.
The most commonly used CX Maturity Models in the industry are Gartner CX Maturity Model, CX Maturity Model Forrester, and Temkin CX Maturity Model.
Gartner CX Maturity Model:
Gartner’s CX Maturity Model provides 5 stages of Customer Experience that help you know which stage you have achieved:
1. Initial: At this stage, companies are still left to curate a proper CX strategy to go about. They mostly use diverse systems to house their customer feedback and interactions.
2. Development: This is the point where companies have realized the need for a well developed CX strategy to document CX practices throughout the organization.
3. Define: The company now has executives backing their CX program. The medium and long-term goals of the CX strategy are listed and defined.
4. Manage: The company focuses on training its employees to follow the CX practices regularly to achieve the set objectives.
5. Optimization: This is the point where the company has fully embraced CX and has advanced technologies to capture all Customer Experience insights.
The more mature you get into your CX strategy, the higher the stage you achieve.
However, according to Customer Think, only 1% of companies have made it to stage 5 while 95% are still in the first 3 stages.
CX Maturity Model Forrester:
Forrester Research firm remarks on the current market scenario as the Age of Customers. With this, Forrester has defined a 4 stage Path to CX Maturity for achieving effective Customer Experience:
1. Repair: In this stage, companies identify the flaws and issues in the customer experience being delivered and try to resolve them at their end.
2. Elevate: In the second stage, companies strive to achieve quality in their Customer Experience strategy. They put in consistent efforts to measure interactions and CX.
3. Optimize: By this stage, companies have a clear CX vision with advanced tools for implementing their plans.
4. Differentiate: Lastly, the companies start using their CX strategy as a core strength for their business. They align their CX practices with customer needs and incorporate customer feedback in their decisions to differentiate from the competition.
According to Forrester, customer experience is and will remain to be a major factor in today’s business decision making. And identifying your level of CX can help you improve and gain a competitive edge.
Temkin CX Maturity Model:
The Temkin Group created a 6 stage Temkin CX Maturity Model:
1. Ignore: Companies at this stage are ignorant of CX as an important factor of success and have no focus on it.
2. Explore: At this stage, companies start realizing the value of CX and form internal committees to discuss the ways of improvement.
3. Mobilize: Companies progress in their CX practices and appoint executives to oversee their strategy.
4. Operationalize: The companies start using the insights and feedback from customers to improvise their operations.
5. Align: Companies reach this stage once they have organization-wide CX adoption and standardized practices aligning to their core objectives.
6. Embed: Once CX is embedded in the core decision-making process of the organization, the company reaches this stage. CX assumes an important role in the company’s culture and purpose and becomes a valuable asset.
However, as per the stats from Customer Think, only 10% of companies have made their way to the last 2 stages while 70% remain at the bottom level.
How to Assess CX Maturity?
While the Gartner CX Maturity Model, CX Maturity Model Forrester, and Temkin CX Maturity Model can help you find the maturity level of your CX program, you need CX Maturity Assessment to assess the value Customer Experience can add to your business.
And so, to assess the breadth, depth, and frequency of your CX practices, you need some CX Maturity Assessment Qualtrics.
While NPS is a great means to measure the CX of a customer, using outdated feedbacks and surveys to capture NPS at a point of sale is useless.
Companies must focus on the entire customer journey rather than sales.
NPS will work well at the end of a process, but for that, it is necessary to understand the customer throughout the process. Such details will help you fill the gaps in CX wherever they arise.
The CX Maturity Assessment Qualtrics by Temkin will help you judge the performance of your CX strategy at all interaction points with the customer. Apart from the customer, you need to focus internally on the level of efforts you generate for improving CX.
One good way to judge this is through the level of investment made. Another way is by taking customers’ feedback about the varied steps like purchase, billing, complaint redressal, etc. and judge the performance of different departments.
The Customer Experience Maturity Curve
Apart from the CX Maturity models and the assessment process, an important CX Maturity Assessment Qualtrics is the Customer Experience Maturity Curve.
The Customer Experience Maturity Curve analyzes the value that CX practices bring to your business across the various levels of organizational adoption of these practices.
The Customer Experience Maturity Curve by FICO depicts the Adoption Levels on the x-axis and the Value to Business on the y-axis. The levels of adoption transit from:
● Unknowing
● Learning
● Initiating
● Building
● Standardizing
● Optimizing
These levels can be replaced by the stages of the model that you choose. As the company progresses across levels reaching the Optimization stage, the value to business increases. However, according to FICO, about 80% of companies are immature in their Customer Experience Management tactics.
Now the question is — Is your company one of them?
Conclusion
CX Maturity is an important means to know whether or not your efforts at CX are paying off. The better you know about the stage of CX Maturity you have acclaimed, the more you can focus on improving it. According to Temkin Group, a slight improvement in CX can help you achieve $775 million in revenue over 3 years. And that kind of ROI is worth enough to value CX and use CX Maturity to improve the same.
